Mon, 31 Dec 2007 by Matt Hopkins
It's the last day of 2007 and I still can't believe that there are companies out there selling "search engine marketing" services that are primarily based on a small amount of SEO and then a monthly submission service. This is a concept that was considered "old hat" and ineffective even when we first opened our doors back in 2001. To think that as a new year approaches there are companies still ripping off their clients with these sort of ineffective service... Read More.
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by Cameron Winslow
Nielson has recently released the latest statistics on what each of the major Search Engines have for market share based on US searches.
There is an article that highlights some of the latest stats: http://searchengineland.com/071228-092326.php
Here are the top five:
Google: 57.7%
Yahoo: 17.9%
Microsoft: 12.0%
AOL: 4.5%
Ask: 2.7%
The figures above are the percentage of all US searches handled by the leading search engines.
It is important to note that search vol... Read More.
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Fri, 21 Dec 2007 by Joe Bursell
Forget Band Aid, or Slade, the Christmas number ones that I'm interested in are the search engine chart toppers. By searching for "Christmas" in the big 3 engines (Google, MSN and Yahoo) you would think it would bring back heart warming, chestnut roasting results.
...and you'd be right. Top of Google's results is www.northpole.com , a "family-oriented Christmas site for children and families to share together"- an oasis of festive frivolity. Yahoo counters that with the mode... Read More.
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by James Daniels
The famous social network has recently released its own pay-per-click program with cost-per-click and cost-per-impression pricing structures. The great thing about advertising with Facebook is that you can accurately work out what type of audience you want to target you ads towards and Facebook will also assist you on this
Facebook’s Pay Per Click reporting interface includes many different features like demographic data, clicks, ad performance and trends. Conversion tracking is not ava... Read More.
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by Kerry Dye
An Australian company MD Webhosting has admitted being a victim to a similar hacking incident that resulted in hidden links being inserted into clients' sites to the one we reported earlier this month.
The ISP has admitted that their security was not up to scratch and that not all their customers were affected. If it is like the hacking we have been tracking, then only those customers with a high Google PageRank will have been targeted.
Although the compromise doesn't have the same visibil... Read More.
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Thu, 20 Dec 2007 by James Daniels
It’s amazing to think that search engines can calculate the gender % of users and their age. But it’s true and recent studies have shown interesting statistics.
A recent study carried out by Hitwise showed that 55% of Google users are male, whereas 58% of MSN users were female. Did you know that paid search listings are most likely to be clicked on my females and organic ads are most likely by males.
Click on Organic Ads Clicked on Paid Ads
Women 56.9% 43.1%
Men 65.4% ... Read More.
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by Kerry Dye
In a what is probably an incredible feat of engineering, Google has announced that the Supplemental index is no more. Whilst we had an inkling of this earlier in the year when they removed the "Supplemental Result" label, it is still a significant milestone.
On the other hand, the issues that used to cause a page to "go supplemental" or into "Google Hell" as it has been coined for the process, have not entirely gone away. For an SEO the identification of these is... Read More.
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Wed, 19 Dec 2007 by Pete Handley
Google recently announced in its webmaster tools blog, that they are extending the sitemaps protocol to include Video. Now I say extending, what I actually mean is that you can upload a second sitemap containing information about the locations of Video on your website.
At the moment, the only ways to get your videos appearing directly in search results pages is to have them listed on one of a number of sites like YouTube, Metacafe, Google Video, MySpace etc, and this sitemap protocol is likel... Read More.
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Mon, 17 Dec 2007 by Matt Hopkins
No matter how you look at it, there are only two ways to achieve decent rankings in the search engines - by chance or by optimisation.
It is totally possible that your site accidentally meets the needs of the search engine's algorithm for your targeted keywords and phrases. If you have decent content, your site isorganised and well-structured, and you have people linking to you because they like you, your site, and your content then you may be doing pretty well on your own.
So whe... Read More.
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by Kerry Dye
I wrote a while ago about ways to exclude
parts of your site from the search engines. In the section about robots.txt removal I
noted that the response was not instant, but I didn't elaborate any more than
that, so I thought I would revisit that subject having observed the response to
some of my robots.txt changes over the last few months.
In Google, the bottom line on removals is
that the page won't get removed until the spider revisits the page. On a small
site that is visited often, this h... Read More.
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Fri, 14 Dec 2007 by Joe Bursell
If Google has its way the likes of Wikipedia and Squidoo are set to face some stiff competition. Yesterday they announced that they have begun building the groundwork for a serious contender. Google Knol (apparently it means a unit of knowledge- who am I to judge?) is intended to provide a resource that will be the first thing that someone who searches for a particular topic- for the first time- will want to read.
The concept is that because the web allows information to be disseminated so fre... Read More.
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by Kerry Dye
I've blogged before about how travel sites
are turning to SEO because they are in such a competitive industry. Therefore I was interested to
read that they have recently been slated for not giving the consumer what they want.
I firmly believe that the Internet was a
revelation for booking travel and it seems unlikely now that someone would turn
to a telephone booking service rather than a website for booking a flight. However,
Forrester Research's data seems to indicate that they are somehow ... Read More.
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Thu, 13 Dec 2007 by Pete Handley
This blog topic is really about a pet peeve of mine (well it's a pet peeve of most Organic Search CDM's at Vertical Leap too and probably every other reputable Search Engine Optimisation company) and that is Web Designers that offer SEO.
Well, maybe not all of them, but a large number of web designers that I am aware of claim to offer SEO as a package bundled in with web design (and sometimes charged on top off the web design fee) but don't actually know what is required for SEO. In the most p... Read More.
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by Matt Hopkins
Naturally, there's a strong focus on keywords with search engine marketing but did you know that the synonyms of your keywords can also help you? The Google algorithm understands many related words and phrases and when these synonyms are used in the anchor text of your links, they will assist in creating a theme around your primary set of keywords.
The great part is, that Google will help you identify these phrases. All you need to do is search Google and use the tilde (~) ope... Read More.
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Tue, 11 Dec 2007 by Cameron Winslow
There is an interesting article I ran across about mobile advertising trends:
http://searchengineland.com/071210-092619.php
They are projecting 5 billion in mobile advertising revenues by 2012 in North America and Europe. This should be incorporated in Australian strategic planning for the near future to ensure companies are positioned in this market.
It is important to note how some of the major players such as Yahoo, AOL, Google, and MSN are positioning themselves and ali... Read More.
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Fri, 07 Dec 2007 by Matt Hopkins
Props to the guys over at NorthSouthMedia who have ranked Vertical Leap as the top SEO company for the National/UK rankings in their November 07 "league table".
Take a look at their latest results or see the extract below:
UK National results as follows:
Company
Nov 07
Oct 07
Alexa
... Read More.
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Wed, 05 Dec 2007 by James Daniels
Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing has been around for a good few years now and there's no sign of it slowing down. Back in the early days of PPC companies were bidding on highly generic terms for just £0.10, nowadays its more like £10.00. For this reason many smaller companies are struggling to keep up with the competition. Bigger companies with deep pockets are saturating the markets and leaving no room for the smaller company. This in my eyes is online marketing discrimination and Goo... Read More.
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Tue, 04 Dec 2007 by Matt Hopkins
SEO is a waste of effort - at least that's what some people will lead you to believe.
Every now and then, waves of debates erupt on various blogs, forums and other online discussion groups with statements that search engine optimisation is over-rated, dead, outdated or simply an impossible goal. I frequently watch these from the sidelines and silently chuckle to myself. Usually, the SEO "nay-sayer" is involved in another form of online marketing such as web design, ... Read More.
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by Jayson Munday
A major area of online marketing and optimisation is creating content on landing pages that will help your viewers perform the action you desire (convert). What a lot of people end up doing is creating several landing pages focusing on a quite a few varied keywords. While these keywords can draw traffic to the pages the likelyhood of having a great conversion ratio is quite slim.
One of the key components of creating landing pages is to recognise the different stages of the... Read More.
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Mon, 03 Dec 2007 by Joe Bursell
Google has evolved to throw up local results when its appropriate, so when you search for e.g. "southampton restaurants" it should bring back a local search result with a map as well as regular web pages.
It works for loads of relatively simple searches e.g. "Derby butchers", "York bakers" etc. (sadly no candlestick makers though).
Google's geographical response is dependant on your location. If I search the web (rather than pages from the UK) for "portsmo... Read More.
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